I'm feeling ambitious. The slicing nerf was a success. We got the devs attention and they changed something according to popular opinion. Now that we know we can get the dev's attention, I want to try for something bigger.

We know the Infiltrator class stealth ship was always meant to be introduced, but was shelved. And I doubt that anyone who likes GSF wouldn't like a new map.

So, to clarify, this is not a petition thread. Lets talk about it first, discuss what to ask for, and then I'll make the petition thread. Is it a long shot? Yes. Is it too much to ask for? Possibly. But before you go nay-saying, remember people said the slicing nerf would never happen. We don't know if we don't try. So lets try. We have nothing to lose. GSF is in the best state its ever been in population wise. There is no better time to ask for this.

Please discuss... Good idea, bad idea? I want to get a feel for whether the community would be behind this, like you were with the slicing nerf.

It'd certainly be a change of pace going from half the team dogfighting 20 km away from the nearest satellite to having 5 infiltrators huddled under the fins in stealth wondering why the satellite stubbornly refuses to turn green.

A new map would be nice.

Dunno if I'd go so far as to suggest a whole new ship, but I wouldn't be opposed to some sort of stealth ability for Scouts, seems like something they should have had to begin with. Probably a short duration - long cooldown kind of thing to prevent people abusing it, make the ship invisible visually and on radar for a few seconds. Be useful for sneaking up on Gunships.

I've always thought Sensor Beacon should have some form of stealth as well, and maybe some mine types too. Perhaps not the damage-heavy ones, I'm thinking more Ion and Interdiction.

Would also give some use to that 'dispels cloaking effects' thing that Targeting Telemetry's tooltips are always telling me about.

A new map would be cool, maybe something planetside for a change. Forests to fly over, canyons/valleys to fly through etc.

There was a big space battle over Corellia in the semi-recent story, so maybe set around the Project Meridian complex?

I'd also like to see objectives added to Battle over Iokath, though I'd imagine quite a bit of wreckage would have to be removed to accommodate the sats, dunno how well that would work out.

Are you talking a whole new class/ships, or added components ? for the existing ones, I mean I'm 99.3% sure new ship, just curious if either or just a whole new ship.

A stealth ship would need more power, I could guess that's one of it's draw backs. would there be a time limit to how long a ship can stay stealth ? can it stay stealth the whole game ?(if conditions allowed it, never to be detected)

Short range only ? A long range sniping stealth could ruin the game, just too OP

Line of sight only, no missile , but the up side larger ring for targeting (the name escapes me at the moment), in other words a higher increase to targeting/hitting %

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It'd certainly be a change of pace going from half the team dogfighting 20 km away from the nearest satellite to having 5 infiltrators huddled under the fins in stealth wondering why the satellite stubbornly refuses to turn green.

 

A new map would be nice.

and that's when you use your EMP to turn off their Sealth

 

and that's when you use your EMP to turn off their Sealth

Negative. First you park above the sat and capture it for your team, THEN you break them out of stealth with EMP, and try to kill them all.

I was alluding to old Dev comments, or maybe it was datamined component info, that strongly implied that stealthed ships would not be able to count toward capturing a satellite unless they came out of stealth. The issue being that if you don't have that feature and there's a Dom game where either nobody has an EMP build, or no one is willing to fly one, then you have serious game balance issues.

The drawback of course, is that you get a scared new player, or a conquest/seasons/[insert most recent checklist treadmill here] farmer who goes into "safe" stealth and parks under a sat, doing nothing for their team. Or rather, you get six of them, and then you're in a match where you're effectively in a 1 v many battle.

Working strong stealth would be cool, but preventing degenerative play incentives would be very difficult, especially if there's a significant "just here for the loot," contingent of players.

It's also a case where as a developer you're almost certain to get it wrong on several tries before you get it right, and depending on how broken the early tries are it's something you might not want to test on the live servers. There are PTS servers of course, but the number of players there tends to be small, and also to be more skilled than average, so the samples if you get them, can be a bit skewed and miss problems that crop up on the live servers.

Since 5.5 GSF development has sort of followed a, "Do it right, and don't break what already works," philosophy. It's really nice as a player, given how rare GSF development is. Doing stealth in that way, would be really really challenging. Not sure if they have the resources to take on that much challenge or not. It'd be great if they do, but it seems like a low probability.

(just quoting,) .

you reminded me of another game I played, that had stealth, and while in stealth, you could not capture, totally forgotten about that.

It didn't make you invisible, just unable to be lock on to, or seen on radar (the red enemy Icon on the mini map), didn't even have the red outline around them.

there were counters, to turn off their stealth, like we already have , EMP, . but there is only one ship that has that ability, that does not require a lock to use .

there were also indicators that there was a stealth near you, still required a eyes only to see them,

someone with bad eyes, would have a tough time against stealth ships, maybe not as bad as trying to kill a mosquito in a unlit room, but close to that effect .

one question comes to mind , how long would a stealth ship, that was EMP'd be without stealth ?

I don't believe there needs to be a new ship/class for stealth, it can just be a component, like in Systems, you can choose., if you have stealth on your ship, you cannot use lock on weapons, hmm maybe there needs to be a new ship to make that work.

then again maybe only have it available on ships as a secondary weapon, not something available in systems, and no gunship can use stealth.

the more I think about it, the more I'm edging towards no stealth ships

getting too many Con feelings to having Stealth in GSF, Still love the idea, but starting to see the nightmare a stealth ship would be in GSF

...

 

one question comes to mind , how long would a stealth ship, that was EMP'd be without stealth ?

Apparently not at all? Jumped in to look up numbers, and the only explicit de-stealth ability I found was Targeting Telemetry. Wording there is unclear as to whether it's an instantaneous effect that just knocks ships out of stealth, or if they're locked out for the entire duration of the TT debuff.

Of course, how the cloaking cooldown works is also a factor. Does it start when you trigger it, or does it start when you exit stealth?

Presumably EMP field, EMP missile, and Remote Slicing could be used to prevent an uncloaked ship from stealthing or re-stealthing by locking out systems abilities, but they and Sensor Beacon make no mention of bringing ships out of stealth.

Another question is whether AOE damage would cause damage flytext would show up on stealthed targets, thus giving away their approximate location to the AOEing ship.

Another interesting question would be whether stealthed ships trigger mines. You can do a workaround in that if you reach the limit of deployed mines deploying another will detonate the oldest mine of that type that you deployed, and I would guess that mine, EMP missile, Ion Railgun, and EMP field AOE damage would still hit cloaked ships.

For that matter can bomber drones hit cloaked ships? I would assume the Interdiction field would work, but what about cannons/railguns/missiles? What about seeker mines, which trigger as mines but then function as missiles?

If things like drones and seeker mines are triggered by cloaked ships, then in theory you should be able to visually see where the impact animation occurs. In that case if you dumb fire lasers (which technically don't need a target selected in order to hit things) or rocket pods do you get hits on the stealthed ship if your aim is good/lucky?

Oh, and what about repair drones. Is there a green healing beam animation to a cloaked ship? If you blast the end of the healing beam with no ship at the end with rocket pods will you get hits on a cloaked ship?

The upside to all these potential interactions, and the many more I'm sure I haven't thought of yet, is that if you get stealth right, you have some really deep and really compelling gameplay opportunities. The downside is that each interaction is another place where you have to get things at least right enough to work adequately well with the rest of GSF's balance.

Since we feeling all daydreamy,

I'd really like upgrades that link GSF to rest of the TOR a bit better. As it stands, your ship exists only in two places: actual matches and hangar menu. Latter feels as present or tangible as CM preview screen of some armor you don't own. So basically, there isn't an in-game place where a GSF pilot&ship returns after the battle. Having an actual in game hangar would increase popularity and revenue of GSF a great deal. Imagine being able to climb on your ship. Watch as engineers switch BLCs to LLCs . And, most importantly, you could oggle at cartel ships, paintjobs and such at peace.

New maps would be cool for sure. Maybe a game mode where you defend turrets and shiel generators of your capital ship and destroy those of enemy.

Stealth ship sounds bit lame, most certainly if we speak of stealth that is somehow similar to traditional rogue in mmos. Stealth as in ship that is like 2x % harder to detect than current ones stacked with sensor dampening...maybe. Im not sure if that'd be much fun ti fly or fly against.

So for those that are unsure what I am talking about, there is an entirely separate class of ship called the Infiltrators, that already exists. The data and coding for them already exist. They were meant to be introduced years back but it never happened. So for them to be brought in, would be a case of finalizing whatever loose ends exist and insert the coding into the live game. It is not an idea I have come up with, it was a ship the devs designed but never brought live.

Also as mentioned already, Targeting Telemetry was always meant to force cloaked ships out of cloak. Hence the line in the tool tip for TT that says it "removes cloaking effects from all enemies within 3000m." TT is doing this. Right now. There are just no stealth ships to be effected by what its doing. This is another reason why I want the infiltrators introduced. It would force more people to play Scouts, since TT is the only confirmed way to dispel their cloaking effects (so far). That would be a welcome meta change from all the Proton spamming and would force people to learn some skills beyond... proton spamming. Aside from that, I am just willing to take the plunge and see what these Stealth ships are all about.

New maps would be cool for sure. Maybe a game mode where you defend turrets and shiel generators of your capital ship and destroy those of enemy

GSF version of SWS fleet battles? Objective, destroy the enemy capital ship? I'd be all over that.

GSF version of SWS fleet battles? Objective, destroy the enemy capital ship? I'd be all over that.

Yeah pretty much. It might not even require a terrible amount of code not already present. GSF is in such a fine balance atm that such mode might work quite well. I can imagine all 4 ship types having a role to play.

..Due to said balance, idea of an entirely new ship class makes me bit nervous! Easy to imagine infiltration ships would prolly be either utterly imba or completely useless til couple of big balance patches arrive. Which might or might not happen after 3 years or something.

So for those that are unsure what I am talking about, there is an entirely separate class of ship called the Infiltrators, that already exists. The data and coding for them already exist. They were meant to be introduced years back but it never happened. So for them to be brought in, would be a case of finalizing whatever loose ends exist and insert the coding into the live game. It is not an idea I have come up with, it was a ship the devs designed but never brought live.

 

Also as mentioned already, Targeting Telemetry was always meant to force cloaked ships out of cloak. Hence the line in the tool tip for TT that says it "removes cloaking effects from all enemies within 3000m." TT is doing this. Right now. There are just no stealth ships to be effected by what its doing. This is another reason why I want the infiltrators introduced. It would force more people to play Scouts, since TT is the only confirmed way to dispel their cloaking effects (so far). That would be a welcome meta change from all the Proton spamming and would force people to learn some skills beyond... proton spamming. Aside from that, I am just willing to take the plunge and see what these Stealth ships are all about.

I did not know that, so the ship already exists

where can I look up the info about this ship?

I did not know that, so the ship already exists

where can I look up the info about this ship?

Good question. There were some dev published articles about it, but I never bothered to save them, so I couldn't point you toward them. Its common knowledge among the seasoned GSF old school pilots. Perhaps someone else will know.

usually it takes me half a day to even find something relevant, but found this in 29 minutes,

closest thing I could find so far for info about the Infiltrator

Ahhh, can't use the link thingy's

https://shadowlandsreconnaissancewing.enjin.com/forum/m/34025565/viewthread/27371202-stealth-ships-revealedwhat-was-gsfs-meta-supposed-to-be

usually it takes me half a day to even find something relevant, but found this in 29 minutes,

 

closest thing I could find so far for info about the Infiltrator

 

Ahhh, can't use the link thingy's

 

https://shadowlandsreconnaissancewing.enjin.com/forum/m/34025565/viewthread/27371202-stealth-ships-revealedwhat-was-gsfs-meta-supposed-to-be

Hey yeah nice work! Yeah that's one I read before. Probably the most comprehensive list of data complied about them. I should have remembered it was SRW who put that together, shame on me. Note though that thread was compiled pre5.5. These days Strikes are much more useful and meta relevant. So they could have a bigger impact on how Infiltrators work in the current meta.

after reading some of that, now I may understand why, there were 5 hangers , yet only 4 classes to choose from, that fifth was most likely, to have a Infiltrator, if those who wanted one of each class to select from . . just a thought

Now I would like to see another Objective mode match, like a defend/attack, and have the Infiltrator available to use.

Be it a Capital ship or some big rock base, that you're attacking or Defending, [Different topic]

what I was wanting to know when searching for that, was how the cloaking was to work, what was the ships hull, which weapons can be used, stuff like that. Wasn't even thinking of new weapons, but see there were some just for the Infiltrator.

funny thing, when I found that only glanced, didn't scroll all the way down, to see there were some images of the ships

So I feel like this didn't generate as much interest / support as the nerf slicing movement did. Bumping it one more time to see if it can get some traction worthy of starting a petition thread. Perhaps maybe we just push for a new map and drop the idea of the stealth ships?

Well, the slicing nerf was a simple, well-defined request and was quite easy for the devs to fix (and yet I was actually surprised that you managed to get some response from them!) whereas here you are asking for new content. I would really like to see that you succeeded, but the odds are poor (which could explain why this does not attract much discussion from the community).

Anyway, as several others have mentioned, introducing the stealth fighters would require a lot of fine-tuning, which does not seem appealing now that we have a very good meta, where almost all ships and components are useful. I would much rather see a new map---or preferably a new game mode (where attacker/defender would be my favorite choice).

Well, the slicing nerf was a simple, well-defined request and was quite easy for the devs to fix (and yet I was actually surprised that you managed to get some response from them!) whereas here you are asking for new content. I would really like to see that you succeeded, but the odds are poor (which could explain why this does not attract much discussion from the community).

 

Anyway, as several others have mentioned, introducing the stealth fighters would require a lot of fine-tuning, which does not seem appealing now that we have a very good meta, where almost all ships and components are useful. I would much rather see a new map---or preferably a new game mode (where attacker/defender would be my favorite choice).

Now content, which to be fair, already exists, but was never introduced. But for sure, that's why I put a discussion thread up first. So, i'm thinking if I create a petition thread, it would be for a new map, potentially for 3rd game mode, and forget the ships.

Admittedly, it's a long way from a simple nerf on single component. But we moaned about that for years and no one ever tried to get the dev's attention on it. First time we tried, it worked. So, yeah, it's a big step, but if we don't try, we won't get anything. There is notihing to lose.